When a Secret is No Longer a Secret

Least Privilege on Shared Systems

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Extending secure access on a heterogeneous system can be complex. One component of the system may have access to a secret, but another may not. And, of course, when a secret gets out, it isn't a secret anymore.

I'm designing a secret system on a third-party data integration tool and I ran across this article.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/the-right-way-to-store-secrets-using-parameter-store/

Important takeaways:

• Encrypt secrets

• Without giving containers and services an identity, it is not possible to protect and restrict access to secrets with access control policies

• Give identity to only the project that needs the resource, not the whole environment

• Use ephemeral resources to pass secrets (like environment variables)

• Give the ephemeral resources hard-to-guess names - MY_SECRET:(some md5 hash)

• Keep track of who knows your secrets